by Hannah Means Shannon

Boom! Studios have made their third announcement in their “Road to San Diego Comic-Con” this year, and it’s a new book from a fan-favorite team. Eugenic will be a “dark vision of humanity’s future” from writer James Tynion IV (The Woods, The Backstagers) and artist Eryk Donovan (Quantum Teens Are Go, Constantine: The Hellblazer).

The limited series is the third installment in the pair’s Apocalyptic Trilogy, following on 2014’s Memetic and 2015’s Cognetic. Like those series, Eugenic will feature three, oversized, 48-page issues. Eugenic debuts in October 2017.

In Eugenic, when a plague ravages the world, one scientist discovers the cure and becomes the savior of mankind. Hope is restored, and the world rebuilds. But then people who took the anti-virus begin having children who are… “unnatural”, and the definition of “normal” is altered forever.

James Tynion IV explains:

In December 2012, when my comics career was in its infancy, I challenged myself to imagine a kind of horror story that I had never seen before. And all in one night, three bizarre concepts came to mind, and I raced to my computer to start jotting them down in a series of documents that would ultimately become the basis for Eryk Donovan and my Apocalyptic Trilogy.

The first two ideas were the most direct, and I knew how to bring them to life. Memetic and Cognetic explored the horrors of being made small—understanding that no matter how unique you believe yourself, we are all fundamentally the same, and when the apocalypse came—whether by an inexplicable Sloth image on the internet that drove you insane, or an alien hive mind looking to extend itself across every brain on the planet—we would all die at the same. They explored the horror of realizing a kind of inescapable homogeneity.Eugenic was always the most difficult concept. The most raw. The most dangerous. Rather than an apocalypse unleashed upon the world from external forces, it is an apocalypse that we unleash upon ourselves. Rather than taking place over a handful of days, each of the three issues are hundreds of years apart. This is an apocalypse of good intentions and the horrors of sameness being allowed to take hold. In literal terms, it is the story of a monstrous new breed of humanity created by a misguided scientist looking to save the world and erase prejudice. Ultimately, these characters learn that hate cannot be genetically engineered out of a species. In the end, we are our own apocalypse.

Eryk Donovan adds:

For our final apocalypse, we wanted to do something a little different. Eugenic is a much more physical tale than Memetic and Cognetic, and with that will come all sorts of lovely body horror, disturbing visages, and creepy weirdness. It’s crazy and dangerous, and we’re going to blow your socks off. Welcome to the world of Eugenic!

Readers who would like to catch up on the “Apocalyptic Trilogy” can read the collected editions of Memetic and Cognetic, which are available in print and digital format.

Eugenic #1 will feature a main cover by Eryk Donovan and a subscription cover by Robbi Rodriguez (Spider-Gwen) and the first issue will arrive in comic shops in October 2017.